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During boot, there are three stages :

  1. Before grub, I have two lines of text flashing telling me that something is not found
  2. Then there is the grub menu
  3. Then there is the normal boot process

On ubuntu server 12.04 LTS, in which log can I find all the text that's displayed during stage 1 and 3?

1 Answer 1

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I doubt you can find stage 1 through Linux. If it appears before grub it has nothing to do with your installed OS. You might be able to find it in your BIOS's logs.

As for stage 3, you can find that text in /var/log/boot.log. For example, here are the 1st 20 lines of mine (yours will be different of course):

$ head -20 /var/log/boot.log 
Scanning for Btrfs filesystems
resume: libgcrypt version: 1.5.3
[e4rat-preload] Open /var/lib/e4rat/startup.log ... 
[e4rat-preload] 6693 files scanned
[e4rat-preload] Pre-loading I-Nodes ...
[e4rat-preload] Execute `/sbin/init' ...
[e4rat-preload] Pre-loading file content ...
INIT: version 2.88 booting
[info] Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
[e4rat-preload] Successfully transferred files into page cache
[ ok ] Reading early boot files....
[ ok ] Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevd.
[ ok ] Synthesizing the initial hotplug events...done.
[ ok ] Waiting for /dev to be fully populated...done.
[ ok ] Activating swap...done.
[....] Checking root file system...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
/dev/sda7: clean, 581416/4505600 files, 6554372/18013696 blocks
done.
[ ok ] Activating lvm and md swap...done.
[....] Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
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  • Thanks for your reply. Well, I don't know if it appears before grub launches. All I can tell, is that it appears a fraction of second before grub displays its menu.
    – Adeline
    May 3, 2014 at 12:55
  • @Adeline in that case it's before GRUB. It is most likely a message about a disk not found. Perhaps you have changed your hardware and the BIOS hasn't realized? In any case, all messages that appear before you chosen your OS in GRUB have nothing to do with the OS. Linux (or any other OS) only comes into play after you've chosen it from GRUB, anything before that is BIOS. The only exception would be a grub error.
    – terdon
    May 3, 2014 at 12:57
  • What I did: in a vmware virtual machine, I installed 12.04 LTS, after partitioning the disk the same way that on my dedicated web server. Then I used TAR to replicate my web server on my virtual machine (thus overwriting the virtual machine). People told me it was possible to perform full backup with tar. Everything is working fine, except for this message displayed. Also, just after grub, I have a message ERROR: no such device: 8cc49b36-64c9-……. press a key to continue…..
    – Adeline
    May 3, 2014 at 12:59
  • @Adeline OK, and is there a problem? If your machine is booting correctly, I wouldn't worry about it.
    – terdon
    May 3, 2014 at 13:00
  • Yes. Except, that's the way I have selected to backup my only and one production web server, in case the disk crashes. I wouldn't want my backup not to work when I need it, or to create a fragile OS install when restored… So, I wish to investigate the issue. What's happening? How can I fix it? Is it related to disk UIDS?
    – Adeline
    May 3, 2014 at 13:01

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